It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a nervous system, so any similarities in cognition between us really are the product of paralllel evolution. And since their environments are also very different from ours, this parallel evoution clearly hints that there is something universal in this consciousness we share, something that seems to want to evolve to similar parameters given half a chance.
We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship. Although first we'd do well to do a better job at communicating with and respecting the many non-human sentient beings on this planet.
Cephalopods are magnificent. I knew they were smart and curious but I was caught off guard the first time I realized that a curious cuttlefish was making eye contact with me. No other reef animals exhibit anything like this kind of intelligence; the dissimilarity is striking. When you start to doubt your interpretation they quite literally flash their emotional state through color changes that seem as telling as human facial expressions.
The article mentions [NSFW!] The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife [1] (erotic Japanese art from 1814) and the books Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [2] by Peter Godfrey-Smith and The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery [3].
Semi-related: "Arrival" was a terrific movie adaptation of "Story of Your Life", an even better short story by Ted Chiang, featuring attempts at communication with advanced alien intelligence. Highest recommendation for both.
"Terrific" is not the word I'd use to describe the adaptation. Arrival was entertaining and had, to me, impressive visual and auditory direction, but it completely missed the point of "Story of Your Life" in the way it changed the ending.
Funny enough, there is a text description on the woodcut itself. If you click through to the photo on Wikipedia I believe there's a translation in the description.
Fair enough. In my understanding "smut" is typically a synonym for pornography, and pornography is generally only valued for its ability to arouse or titillate.
It's not so clear; not only is there porn that has meaning or even a message(think some fanfiction, or certain hentai manga), but erotic art sits in a strange position. Philosophers still argue about whether 'erotic art' is art, or whether it can be delineated from porn at all. Not to mention, there are contemporary (last five years) arguments for and against porn itself being art. You can make a reasonable case (i.e. one taken seriously by experts in the field) either way.
MAIDEN: You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Aah! yes… it’s…there!!! With the sucker, the sucker!! Inside, squiggle, squiggle, oooh! Oooh, good, oooh good! There, there! Theeeeere! Goood! Whew! Aah! Good, good, aaaaaaaaaah! Not yet! Until now it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! Ooh! Whew! How are you able…!? Ooh! “yoyoyooh, saa… hicha hicha gucha gucha, yuchyuu chyu guzu guzu suu suuu….”
I have spent many an idle day swimming around a reef, playing with an Octopus like a puppy.
They are delightful, inquisitive, smart creatures who seem to really enjoy engaging with these huge ungainly creatures from the land that occasionally stop by. I made acquaintance with one octopus on my local reef by introducing it to gold goins - they can't seem to resist shiny gold things, and indeed in this case, I gave the coin to the octopus and it swam off to its hidden midden (which I was able to find after a while), where it had also collected bottles-caps and lost fishing tackle.
Another time, I watched a smaller octopus playfully baiting whitefish by dangling an empty crayfish husk out of its hole .. just idly floating it in the current until a dumb whitefish came along for a nibble, and then BAM out came another tentacle from the hole, and the world was less one dumb whitefish.
I absolutely love love love love 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife'...I saw it for the first time online almost twenty years ago and even then without knowing what it meant or the language, i just knew that it would be the most erotic thing that I will ever see.. two decades since, I still stand by that assessment.
> We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a healthy or productive relationship.
In my opinion, this is a stretch. By comprehend and recognize, what do you mean? For an octopus, ant, or orca, we have little to no comprehension of their intelligence, philosophy, or consciousness. All of those things are a black box to us. We can observe behavior and take notes, but I think it's a huge leap to say we comprehend their intelligence.
It's an even bigger leap to say we could establish communications and relationships with an alien species. What is our relationship with orcas? We starve them, kill them with boats and pollutants, and we imprison them for entertainment. We try to rid the world of ants and attack and poison them on sight. We eat octopuses and also pollute their environment. I wouldn't call those things a relationship.
As for communication, how do we do there? We have almost no capability of talking to orcas or octopuses. And it's not a fault of theirs. It's because we are indeed different. There is even less hope for ants.
The existence of orcas, ants, and octopuses on Earth is the exact evidence I need to form the opinion that it is probable that there are alien species that we simply can't comprehend and vice versa.
Is it really that hard to believe there's a species out there such that we humans are their ant?
I agree with all of this and also want to add, we only recognize octopi as intelligent because they are operating on our timescales. What would happen if we encountered nearly crystalline life. They might have a rich culture, art, and scientific understanding.. but it might be only for phenomenon that they have any hope of interacting with.
I often wonder about plants. Suppose a forest and/or its network of fungi was "intelligent" in some sense. It may well be that the intelligence only manifests on extreme scales and contexts well beyond human's ability to see. Perhaps forests engage in millenia long chess games to reshape their environment more favorably in battle with other species or something. Perhaps its in a way that relies on very old memories passed down from their ancestors stored via genetics or some other means, and involves very complex decisions we can't even hope to compute on our best computers. We'd barely even be able to recognize that, and certainly wouldn't have much hope of seeing the intelligence in action. We don't know the first thing about "how to tree".
There's a fantasy world where fossils are actually stone-based forms of life that just move so slowly you can only even detect it over periods of thousands of years. To them stone is a liquid, and folded strata are actually waves.
Yea, we simply don't know about the intelligence of other things, and so I don't get the perspective that other things are the thing less intelligent when we're in the same boat as them as not being able to communicate with them. There are symbiotic relationships like cats and dogs, and mammals generally share a certain something, but we still have little to no knowledge of what's going on, even in mammals, much less more exotic things. For the octopus, we recognize intelligent of things we notice, but what about intelligence they have that isn't noticed by us.
Your description reminded me of a book called The Dragon's Egg. I haven't read it but need to. The gist is that there's a species that somehow thrives on or in a neutron star. However, their time scales are not slow but extremely fast. That's all I know about it other than it apparently being a tutorial on neutron stars masquerading as a novel.
> We have almost no capability of talking to orcas or octopuses. And it's not a fault of theirs.
How do you know that? Specifically, that they are capable of two way communication, which is suitable for establishing, for lack of a better word, diplomatic relations.
For ethical reasons we need to presume that they indeed are capable of that. But it's different from knowing that they are capable.
> We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship.
Gorillas can use sign language, dogs can use speaking buttons, I’m sure dolphins or orcas could be taught something we would recognise as language, maybe even chimpanzé
In the case of Gorilla, I think it wasn't quite the level of sign language that it learned, but vocabularies and phrases.
I had a psychology professor who was part of the research teaching Koko sign language. And according to him, what Koko learned was really impressive, more than they anticipated. But it was still fundamentally different from human language.
It was a long time ago, and I don't recall what exactly was lacking. It could be on the lines of grammatical structures, that for Koko, there was no difference between "not want banana" and "want banana not". She didn't have an idea of what the negation was directed at. In the eye of linguistic psycholinguistics, the difference wasn't trivial.
In contrast, human children, even with limited vocabulary, could grasp and even invent grammars.
> In contrast, human children, even with limited vocabulary, could grasp and even invent grammars.
The most prominent example would be Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was spontaneously invented over only a few years by deaf schoolchildren, ages four to sixteen, who had little or no other language.
The science isn't there for gorillas communicating like humans. No publications, no data and Robin Williams anecdotes instead. If there was something there one would think there would be more scientists doing research down that path.
There's quite a bit of speculation that dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales are already using communication with sufficient complexity to be seen as language.
I think it was the sleeve notes of "Stop making sense" by Talking Heads that had a lot of little aphorisms and one of them was something like:
'Dolphins are very smart but they don't want to talk to us'
Famously, their eyes are almost identical to ours, and are purely the product of parallel evolution.
One difference, though is that at some point during our evolution there was a glitch, or at least it took a less-than-optimal turn, that resulted in our retina being 'inverted', i.e. light must traverse the nerves and some tissue before reaching the light receptors, while theirs is as one would expect, i.e. with the light receptors at the front. [1]
This also means that our retina has a blind spot, while theirs does not.
The last common ancestor had eyes. The same genes control development and placement of eyes. I.e., you can stick a human put-an-eye-here gene into a fruit fly, and an eye grows there.
Fun fact: death after mating is controlled by a single gene. If there were any net benefit to not dying after, one or other species would have it turned off.
I'm not sure it's clear how 'advanced' the last common ancestor was. From the hypothesised date, if it had 'eyes' they probably were simple light sensors:
" But our last common ancestor with the octopus was probably some kind of wormlike creature with eye spots that lived as many as 750 million years ago; " [1]
It's because your whole body develops "inverted" compared to theirs. Evolution got your eyes to point the right way and do something useful even though there's a blind spot, instead of growing optimally but facing inward and being useless.
I draw the exact opposite conclusion from the same premise.
Octopuses (cephalopods) are our direct relatives; we have physical contact with them; we easily observe to be intelligent; we know them to communicate with each other, and yet we can't meaningfully communicate with cephalopods.
How do we have any hope of communicating with an extra-terrestrial intelligence?
Too many speculative versions of really weird aliens throw out constraints that are likely to be universal in an attempt to emphasise strangeness. Things like basic constraints such as the conservation of energy and matter, evolutionary pressure, information theory, game theory.
Take Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, who apparently has no understanding whatsoever of the reasons why humans do the things they do. What sort of superintelligence doesn't even get the simplest principles of competitive behaviour and dysfunctions that can arise from competition for resources? But no, we are incomprehensible to him and it all has to be explained by the humans, even though his own civilization went through _exactly_ the same problems.
It's fine for fiction, but taking that way of thinking and applying it to speculations in the real world as though it's valid science is an error.
It seems completely reasonable to me that space-faring creatures who have reached Earth would likely have been living in a post-scarcity environment for long enough that competitive dysfunction would be (literally) alien.
I personally believe that at some point civilizations will stop using their bodies and live in something like computers or whatever it will be by then. So we may already be living in a highly networked universe without noticing it.
With all the technological progress I can’t imagine why someone would want to deal with our very flawed bodies in the long run. We are already getting more and more of our experiences though means like TV and the Internet and I don’t see that trend stopping.
Our bodies are extremely powerful and versatile. If we actually understood how they work and how to build/modify them, we'd get way more mileage out of them than an electromechanical alternative.
Imagine a body with perfect physique, maximum strength, a bigger/denser brain, programmable immune system, etc. It could even be adapted for deep sea or outer space life.
We haven't even begun to understand biotech at this level, because of moral/ethical concerns and a general aversion to anything organic (understandable, experimentation with sentient life is seen as bad, and our primitive side rejects most foreign biomatter altogether).
I don't understand how that could happen. It is something descibed in fiction from time to time. But I don't see how you can move your consciousness from your body somewhere else. Copy perhaps. But the consciousness that remain in the body will want to live on, I am sure. So that is why I cannot see us "stop" using our bodies. Certainly, we can become extinct, but that is something else.
We also don't know that a digital copy will be conscious. That's an assumption based on thinking functionalism is correct. But we simply don't know what the correct theory of consciousness is and what sort of limits that places on reproducing it artificially.
BBC's Blue Planet had a segment that showed an octopus and an entirely different species, a grouper fish I think, communicating with each other by changing the color of their skin, to coordinate and trap prey.
Watching something like that really hits home how intelligence already comes in so many forms on our own planet.
Our environments are very different places on Earth, but they might be very similar compared to some other sci-fi ideas about life, such as life evolving in charges particles suspended in plasma. :)
You’re optimistic. I like that. On a different note: I think it’s also possible to imagine that humans will try to eat the aliens. Some love eating cuttlefish.
Can we comprehend them? From what I've read about it, consciousness in octopuses has to be completely alien to ours, because it's spread out over multiple brain centers, including one for each arm. So the arm is a semi-intelligent entity of its own.
No idea to what extent the article discusses this; part of it is blocked by a paywall, after which it continues about eating moluscs. But just like people eat octopuses, it's entirely possible that alien intelligence end up on our dinner plates before they end up at our negotiating table.
To be fair, our brain is also split into two halves that have limited bandwidth to communicate. It's not clear how much bandwidth is needed to "feel" like a single entity.
> Can we comprehend them? From what I've read about it, consciousness in octopuses has to be completely alien to ours...
What is completely alien is the evolutionary path compared to our own. What feels familiar is the connection you feel with these animals when they interact with you. They seem to be caught in a comical struggle between fear and curiosity. It feels human.
Does the physical build actually matter? "We" are just virtual constructs that happen to run on a brain inside a skull at the top of a four-limbed creature.
For an organism that evolved on this planet, it stands to reason they'd have some experience similar to ours. The fact that their consciousness would run on multiple nodes is of little relevance imo
Somewhat off-topic, but I just couldn't get into the second book, whereas I loved the first book.
I think it's because Children of Ruin didn't have as much of the way relatable human (or Human, as the book goes into) characters to latch onto as an anchor while they explore the evolution of a different kind of intelligence. I was really rooting for some of the human characters in Children of Time, namely Lain, whereas Children of Ruin just felt a little too, uh, alien.
Was wondering why I had to scroll this long for this to be recommended.
The two books in the series are both fascinating for trying to imagine thinking in the manner of another species evolved to be "human level intelligence."
I enjoyed the first book more, but the second does an admirable job exploring what communication, thought processes, and technology look like from an octopodes perspective.
To this day I wonder if consciousness is needed, or a hindrance for intelligence. That is that SF is all about, raising and play with these kind of questions. Can truly recommend Blindsight.
I've also read both books. It's a good exploration into the minds of spiders and octopuses, if given "uplift".
A recent study I read about shows that spider intelligence is ill-studied but actually holds a wealth of interesting facets. Jumping spiders plan, such as when hunting, and can be surprised. They are also doing elaborate planning when building webs, and make adjustments to strength/stickiness in webs based on failed catches. It's sophisticated tool use. And yet their brains are teeny weeny puny things.
Another novel that you might enjoy if you haven't read is "A Deepness in the Sky", it's similar to Children of Time (and predates it), but told in a different way. Both are highly enjoyable and packed with ideas.
Anecdote : I had a mate who was a paramedic; called to a junkies house he noted a tarantula in a tank and felt terribly sorry for it - so bought it for £10. It lived for many years in it's flat, and it hid from people who it didn't know - but if you were calm and waited for it to try its courage, the after a while it would come and inspect you . Should you act kindly to it, well then for ever afterwards it would come out and greet you when you entered the room. I got the idea that it was a "personal" organism - it had an idea of others, and itself.
If you're recommending A Deepness in the Sky, you should also recommend A Fire Upon the Deep by the same author (Vernor Vinge). A very different take on alien intelligence, and possibly more relevant to the octopus model in that it covers distributed selves, albeit over individuals rather than limbs.
I can think of a couple more major disadvantages they have.
3. Living underwater. Fire is the easiest way to extract energy from raw materials, and there's no real substitute. On land, there's a lot of local, controllable dynamism, but when you put things down they tend to stay where you put them, at least on short timescales. Water is exactly the opposite: lots of changes you can't control, but no way to get a lot of energy all in one place. Dolphins would have a hard time developing technology for the same reason, even if they had the dexterity.
4. Not being apex predators. This is part of the short lifespan problem, but I think it goes beyond that. Not many animals are going to mess with a human if they can help it, which means that it didn't take much for us to get to the point of having some free brain cycles to spend on improving things. An octopus is comparatively small and squishy, and shares an environment with comparatively more large and toothy carnivores, which means that even when they do manage to survive for more than a couple years they're doing it by spending most of their time eating and hiding.
3 seems to be the an argument from the anthropic principle. Oxidation happens in water too, in different forms. Perhaps not as rapid. I would imagine someone from Mon Calamari would have came up with a completely "easiest" way to extract energy.
Slow oxidation underwater isn't useful for anything, though. You can't use it to do work without a lot of additional technology to capture energy over long time periods.
Set aside what we know about human technological progress. You need some energy source to be the base of your technology pyramid, and it needs a few properties: it needs to be naturally occurring so that you can discover it by accident; it needs to be controllable or predictable enough that you can use it selectively; and it needs to be fast/intense enough that you can transform materials without massive time investment. What do you pick? On land, you have fire, flowing water, and, at a stretch, the muscles of large herbivores. Underwater, you have... ???
Also, that's not what "anthropic principle" means.
I think that lifespan it is their biggest disadvantage, and the reason why there is no octopus civilization, unless you want to go beyond the Mountains of Madness.
Modern humans for instance spend more time learning than the lifespan of most animals. If we were limited to a lifespan of 20 years, which is typical for a mammal of our weight class, human society would have been very different. Make it 5 years and there probably wouldn't have been any society at all.
This, I believe, makes them even weirder. With so much intelligence, why didn't they evolve longevity as a way to capitalize on their experience? Why didn't they develop collective strategies that are so effective in other animal species?
Answer to both of your questions is that there was no evolutionary path.
Evolution is blind and path dependent. It only responds to differential pressures affecting just now. Evolution is like
greedy search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm
They didn't develop longevity because intelligence + longlivety does not provide immediate advantage.
They didn't develop collective strategies because they the path path to collective strategies providing gains is too long or too unlikely to happen.
Most likely because they have complex tentacles that need fine motor control. Their brains developed to control their body. Their eyes seem to be good as well.
Even in human brain huge area of brain dedicated into hands. Human fine motor skill (or dexterity) is superior compared to other apes. We can do small detailed moves. Other apes and monkeys are clumsy.
After the complexity of brain developed to control their dexterity, octopus gets benefit from spatiotemporal intelligence to exploit tentacles in hunting and moving. It's not surprising that intelligence plan and solve problems as well.
I guess that's it. Some other asocial animals are pretty smart, because they need it for hunting, or something. (Although even the most anti-social mammals still interact with their mom!)
The marginal intelligence point makes survival to reproduce more likely, so octopi that are marginally smarter tend to be slightly more likely to reproduce.
However, they seem to die very soon after mating for some reason related to their evolutionary history. There's no way for a marginally longer-lived octopus to be more successful at reproduction, because reproduction is a one-shot event for them. If anything there's pressure to reproduce (and die) at a younger age, since these octopi would be more successful.
Such are the tragedies of evolution, the blind idiot god.
They live in complex environments. Often on the boundary between water and land. And some octopuses, do seem to make good use their intelligence - for example the mimic octopus.
I guess an important thing is that they hunt in this environment (in which clams also do just fine). And, like us, they don't have much bodily defence against being eaten by others.
> intelligence + longlivety does not provide immediate advantage
You gotta wonder what sort of environmental pressures make intelligent animals less fit for survival by creating communities. Few predators? Very simple environments that don't require passing on information to future generations? High competition for resources?
Energy and nutritional requirements, longer time before reaching adulthood. For humans one of the limiting factor is the female pelvis. Births become more difficult.
A society of monks living mostly alone would be more advanced than a society of busy workers competing for resources in a city hive. Octopuses may also have other means of communication: just like we use radiowaves and electricity, octopuses may have some natural radiowave emitters and receivers in their brains. And a short lifespan is a subjective measure: what matters is the amount of experience.
I wonder about the relationship between consciousness and Turing completeness. Although we don't have infinite tapes inside our heads, it seems that one could imagine a succession of progressively richer finite approximations to Turing-style computational universality. Perhaps "degrees on consciousness" as discussed in the article have to do with the depth of the approximation a creature with a given physiology can make to computational universality. I believe that the independent evolution of eyes resulted in surprising similarities, because of the underlying physics of photons, and the constraints placed on solving the same problems of interpreting streams of photons. It might be that there is some similar unifying computational phenomenon that drives evolution to similar mutually intelligible consciousnesses even via radically distinct evolutionary paths.
Turing Completeness is pretty mundane. You just need GOTOs and IF statements, and registers/variables. Thats it really. Its not hard to acheive at all.
The Emperors New Mind by Roger Penrose discusses the opposite idea, that consciousness has a non-computational element that could never even be approximated by a turing machine. I don't really agree with it but its an interesting book.
And for those who havent heard of him - Roger Penrose is a serious scientist and philosopher who did some of the key work on Black Holes with Stephen Hawking, so he's worth listening to.
What we describe as awareness "consciousness" might not really exist. If everything is just a subsystem of the main system being the universe. Anyway I find it a fun philosophical question to think about.
Fantastic article. Superb writing and makes me ponder about our species in general.
I do have a general take on how humans perceive or judge other organisms through a very human lens. We characterize organisms based on their social structure, longevity, 'cleverness' etc. While looking at how humans compare with octopuses at a meta level, octopuses seem to be not waging wars, more peaceful, seem to have survived for more than 600 millions years. I wonder if human beings would have a similar track record: looks like humans are well into destroying their own kind and the environment faster than most other creatures.
At the same time human beings seem ill equipped to judge or characterize 'alien' lives: we often want to 'make contact' or have a communication or social channel with aliens. As if a show of our mental power and social structure is the most important aspect..
Just looking at how octopuses are being measured by humans, it feels rather silly the kind of approaches humans use to evaluate other species let alone aliens.
Thanks for the interesting article. I didn’t know their mechanism of mating really besides the specialized arm.
However, it is my understanding from previous reading that male octopuses die within months of mating and that female octopuses die after laying its eggs. I am surprised this article doesn’t mention it because it puts the cannibalism into perspective. It seems the biologically triggered death after mating and laying eggs is an evolutionary strategy, so it makes the female eating the already dying male less cannibalistic and more strategic.
> looks like humans are well into destroying their own kind and the environment faster than most other creatures.
To be fair - we really only focus on war against our own kind so much since we've basically won against every other one. Sure, there are still problems in small, but in general no other species is a threat to a large part of us in general.
Also, destroying the environment really is a side effect of industrialization, so I don't think that's a fair comparison either. No other species needs any kind of stable power grid, but that's surely not because we're less advanced.
> At the same time human beings seem ill equipped to judge or characterize 'alien' lives: we often want to 'make contact' or have a communication or social channel with aliens. As if a show of our mental power and social structure is the most important aspect..
Honest question: What is?
> Just looking at how octopuses are being measured by humans, it feels rather silly the kind of approaches humans use to evaluate other species let alone aliens.
In some way, yes. But it's hard to do it any other way; most possible partners are seriously limited in their communication abilities and (at least probably) in their intelligence.
For some reason I really expected this to be an interview with Danny Carey.
Parallel evolution is amazing. Developing complex communication between human and octopus would be an amazing feat and would likely answer some of our questions about the nature of consciousness.
Does anyone know if there has ever been experimentation with training octopuses to use some kind of user interface (buttons, dials, sliders, joysticks) with a grayscale screen or some other kind of modulated output to solve problems for rewards?
Could an octopus learn to play Super Mario Bros or Pac-Man to beat levels for crab?
If we could find a reliable way to teach an input language to an octopus we could start probing what classes of problems are easier or harder for them solve. We could develop octopus input devices that maximize the size of the 'octo-bus', and find ways to give them an "immersive experience" by modulating their environment (temp, salinity, pH, etc) as feedback.
Anyone with me on this? I haven't found anything, but I don't know if my "dorking" is up to par.
If anyone is else is interested in thought experiments on how other forms of intelligence / sapience may evolve, try to read "Children of Time" and "Children of Ruin" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Also if anyone else has other books that follow similar themes, please recommend!
Wang's carpets is a short story about life evolving within a simulation of a naturally occurring computer. (also part of the larger novel Diaspora)
Schild's Ladder is about physicists researching the fundamental 'geometry' of the universe and accidentally create a quickly expanding geometry that is more stable than a regular vaccuum, very unhealthy for all regular matter, but...
This was a really awesome article! Very well written and utterly thought-provoking.
Also this blurb from the author's website is amazing[1]:
> To research her books, films, and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by a silverback gorilla, embrced by a Giant Pacific Octopus and undressed by an orangutan. But she is perhaps best known for her 14 year love affair with Christopher Hogwood, a runt piglet who grew to a 750-pound great Buddha master.
The article is a good read. I was left with even more questions:
How come that most documentaries explain the vibrant and undulating colors as some sort of communication, when in actuality there is no evidence that they can observe colors?
Even more interesting is the question where do the chromatophores get their color "data" since there are no apparent color receptors in their eyes or skin so that they can mimic their surroundings for camouflage?
From what I've read elsewhere, an octopus's pupils isolate colors via chromatic aberration. They can see a range of colors, but only one color at a time.
The opening of this article references Hokusai's "Great Wave" woodblock print. There's an easter egg in this print I never noticed, which is that Mount Fuji is nestled in the trough of the wave.
I strongly recommend both of these books. The Soul of an Octopus is more anecdotal and Other Minds is more academic; in sum they offer not just a fascinating picture of octopuses, but a larger discussion on consciousness and foreign intelligence.
I've always been amazed and fascinated by octopuses. Their intelligence, the way they can manipulate their bodies. Most of all the almost instantaneous ability to change their skin color and camouflage with their environment. I highly recommend this episode of PBS 'Nature' I recently watched.
One amazing snippet that is contradictory to human beings: octopuses are color-blind across their entire body (with their physical eyes as well as their "body" eyes) but they are excellent camouflage artists! How is that even possible. Don't you need to perceive color to be able to take it??
Hm, that is a good question. Evolutionarily, there is not necessarily any benefit for the octopus to being conscious of color, but there has to be some way in which its body, if only mechanically, "perceives" color and imitates it.
I don't think we'll be doing well with SETI until we have a better understanding of the animals around us. This planet is teeming with non-mammalian intelligence and mostly we either ignore it, are irritated by it, or try to eat it.
Being an octopus is intelligent and great until Korean people decide to pluck you as a baby out of the ocean and boil you alive for fun (and laugh as you struggle in unimaginable pain).
I can't read the article at the moment to judge, but going by some of the comments, the original famous essay of this ilk (exploring the idea of consciousness by imagining experiencing life as an very different species) might be of interest.
We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship. Although first we'd do well to do a better job at communicating with and respecting the many non-human sentient beings on this planet.